From the Very Beginning ....to the Troubled Times to come Before the Deluge...

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Thursday, 13 February 2014

Neanderthal Mind

The Neanderthal Mind

by Marek

Among the oldest human objects that unequivocally defy
practical explanations are shells punctured with holes. Try as you might, it’s
hard to see them as anything other than beads or pendants. Traces of ochre at
sites occupied by ancient humans offer earlier hints of adornment, perhaps even
of symbolism, but sceptics argue that the pigment might have been used for some
practical purpose: tanning hides, for instance. In perforated seashells,
however, we find the first truly compelling tokens of expressive humanity.

Early humans must have reached beyond their immediate
concerns in many ways that have left no traces. But they did reach for shells
very early. Some 75,000 years ago in southern Africa, they gathered and pierced
them, perhaps to make bracelets or necklaces. Twenty-five thousand years later
and nearly 10,000km away, in what is now southern Spain, others collected
naturally perforated shells. Independently and far removed from each other,
humans took similar paths into expressive culture. What does that tell us about
the human mind?

‘That we’re dealing
with the same human mind in both instances,’ said João Zilhão, archaeology
research professor at the University of Barcelona. Zilhão is the first author
on a 2010 paper announcing the discovery of three perforated shells at Cueva de
los Aviones in Murcia in south-east Spain. He and his colleagues also found a
half-shell with traces of pigments in it, as if it had served as a paint cup or
palette. But Zilhão’s assessment of the cognitive power of his ancient
shell-collectors is controversial. While the southern African people were
modern humans, anatomically speaking, the ones at Cueva de los Aviones must
have been Neanderthals. Neanderthals were the only hominins living in Europe
50,000 years ago; anatomically modern humans did not move in from Africa until
thousands of years later. After their arrival, Europe saw an explosion in
cultural creativity.

This poses the question of what being anatomically modern
means for being human. Were the Neanderthals just stocky northerners with heavy
brow ridges, or were their minds built differently as well as their bodies?
Were they innately capable of doing what modern humans did? Were they, in fact,
us? Bearing, as they do, on the problem of human difference, these questions
are sprung with tension. Neanderthals have long been portrayed as brutish, or
cognitively inferior to modern humans. Rebuttals of this picture are sometimes
referred to as ‘anti-defamation’, not entirely in jest.

Still, if these were all the same human minds, the ones in
Europe did not explore their potential as far or as fast as the ones in Africa.
The signs of modern human behaviour — beads, ochre, engraved patterns — are
much stronger at Blombos Cave in South Africa than at Cueva de los Aviones in
Spain. And they are not the the earliest. Shell-beads were collected even
earlier in northern Africa, and one found at Skhul in Israel may be more than
100,000 years old. But these are flickering signals, not a steady glow of
progress. For tens of millennia, as far as the record shows, modernity came and
went. The Aviones Neanderthals might have been leading lives as sophisticated
as those of many of their anatomically modern contemporaries.

Zilhão insists that they were. Arguments for modern
superiority are often based on anachronistic comparisons between the rich
artworks produced by modern humans in Europe and the tenuous earlier hints of
symbolism left by Neanderthals. To him, that’s like saying ‘people in the
Middle Ages were cognitively handicapped because they could not use mobile
phones’. A lot, therefore, comes down to how old various artefacts really are.
And this has lately become one of the most controversial fronts in the study of
the relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans. Things have turned out
to be a lot older than they previously appeared.

The confusion arose because radiocarbon dating is near the
limits of its range in the critical period. When living tissue dies, it stops
taking up carbon, so the date of death can be calculated from the proportion of
naturally occurring radioactive carbon left in it. But after 30,000 years, only
about three per cent of the radiocarbon is left, so even a small amount of
modern carbon contamination can distort the dating results severely. Just one
per cent of contamination can throw things out by as much as 7,000 years.

Using improved techniques, Tom Higham and his colleagues at
the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit revised a series of key dates for the
advent of anatomically modern humans in western Europe. A couple of teeth found
in southern Italy in 1964, previously thought to be Neanderthal, were
re-scrutinised in the most minute detail and attributed to modern humans. The
new dates for the site showed that they were between 43,000 and 45,000 years
old. The dates for a fragment of modern human jawbone found in 1927 at Kents Cavern,
in south-west England, were pushed back more than 5,000 years, to between
41,500 and 44,200 years ago. Researchers such as Chris Stringer, research
leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, used to think
that the Neanderthals had Europe to themselves until around 35,000 years ago.
Now they are inclined to think that modern humans arrived in western Europe
about 45,000 years ago, moving along the Danube from the Balkans and spreading
rapidly across the region.

Higham thinks the revisions are nearly complete. ‘We might
push the dates back a little bit, but I doubt it very much,’ he said. ‘We’ve
looked at most of the sites and the dates seem to be falling into reasonably
coherent clusters and groups. The problem for us as dating specialists is at
around 50,000 years ago — that’s really the limit of our technique.’ But his
team did secure the 50,000-year date that puts clear prehistory between the
Cueva de los Aviones shells and modern humans. This provides Zilhão with
compelling support for the case that Neanderthals found their own way to
symbolism or ornament — that they didn’t just copy the modern human
interlopers.

On the other hand, Higham and his colleagues have found
evidence that threatens Zilhão’s argument that Neanderthals and modern humans
living at the same time were culturally equivalent. In the Swabian Jura region
of Germany, along the old line of the Danube valley, there are dramatic signs
of a sudden and breathtaking cultural nascence among modern humans — flutes
made from swan wingbones and mammoth tusks, ivory figurines with humanoid
bodies but heads like lions, the oldest known sculpted female form: art beyond
any shadow of doubt or argument. According to Higham’s new figures for one of
the Jura sites, Geissenklösterle, that happened 40,000 years ago, or around
5,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Zilhão doesn’t believe it. ‘There is absolutely no evidence
at all for any of that stuff being made before 36—37,000 years ago,’ he
declared. ‘That’s it. Period.’ Although he thinks the last Neanderthals
persisted in Iberia until around that time, contact between them and moderns
elsewhere in Europe occurred much earlier. The figurines, he insists, were made
5,000 years after modern human groups had entered that part of Europe and
assimilated the Neanderthals.

In the old days, says Robin Dunbar, professor of
evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, Neanderthals were seen as
‘shambling troglodyte ape-men, with the emphasis on the ape’. Now, he observes,
the divide among ‘the Neanderthal folk’ is between ‘those who are very
determined to show that they are modern humans, and those who don’t think
they’re quite modern human’.

João Zilhão is as determined as anyone to challenge claims,
which he traces back to 19th-century beliefs about racial hierarchy, that
Neanderthals were innately inferior to modern humans in any way. Dunbar,
however, considers that ‘they just weren’t quite in the same league as we
were’, and Chris Stringer takes a similar view. ‘I think there is a difference
between us and Neanderthals in behaviour,’ he said. ‘It’s not as big a gulf as
we used to think, but there is a gap, and that might at least partly explain
why Neanderthals died out.’

Perforated shells found at Cueva de los Aviones in Spain Perforated
shells found at Cueva de los Aviones in Spain. Photo by PNAS

The last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans
probably lived more than 300,000 years ago. The two lineages had accumulated
long histories of separate evolution by the time of their final encounters in
western Europe. Yet the draft Neanderthal genome, sequenced from the remains of
three different individuals found in Vindija Cave in Croatia, adds a twist to
this story. Announced in 2010, it contained the revelation that living people
of Asian and European descent share from one to four per cent of their DNA with
Neanderthals. That suggests a deep (and so far mysterious) history of
interbreeding, especially in Asia.

One thing we do know is that Neanderthals differed
anatomically from modern humans. Their build was more robust. Their skulls were
elongated, compared to the globular modern form. That alone might be
significant. Dunbar recently collaborated with his doctoral student, Eiluned
Pearce, and Chris Stringer on a study that investigated whether the difference
in skull shape reflects differences in the organisation of the brain. The
characteristic features of Neanderthal skulls include large eye sockets and a
bulging ‘bun’ at the back. As the main area for processing visual information
is at the back of the brain, Dunbar wondered whether the two traits might be
connected. Just as a larger telescope dish will gather more light than a
smaller one, and so will demand more computing power to process the data,
larger eyes should work better in low ambient light levels, and will require
more dedicated brain capacity to analyse the information they provide. Perhaps
Neanderthals had big eyes because they lived under grey northern skies.

When they measured
Neanderthal eye sockets and did the brain-capacity calculation, Pearce and her
colleagues worked out that Neanderthal group sizes would have been smaller than
those of anatomically modern humans

Pearce and Dunbar examined recent human skulls, finding that
people whose ancestors lived at high latitudes had bigger eye sockets than
people whose ancestors lived closer to the equator. They had bigger brains too,
but only to go with their bigger eyes: Dunbar hastened to say that ‘It’s got
nothing to do with their smartness at all.’ Then again,

Neanderthals had brains
the same size as their anatomically modern contemporaries, so if they adapted
to the dim north by increasing the proportion of brainpower they allocated to
vision, they would have less brain capacity available for other purposes. Their
larger bodies would also add to the neural load, since the more tissue a body
has, the more nerves and central processing it requires.

As an anthropologist, Dunbar is best known for ‘Dunbar‘s
Number’, a figure representing the average maximum number of relationships an
individual can meaningfully sustain. It is based on the relationship between
the size of the neocortex — the part of the brain whose development is most
pronounced in humans — and the size of social groups. A large neocortex allows
the brain to process a high volume of social information, and thus to sustain a
dense network of relationships. For living humans, the typical maximum is
around 150 individuals.

about me

A new counter-culture is now spreading across the planet, a movement dedicated to protesting at the outlandish behaviour of the control freaks, with their surveillance, eavesdropping, secrecy and lies. Their greed and belligerent sabre rattling and their industries of war. The dream is to replace these sociopaths with Love!

I wish this blog to be a small part of this - We must be the change.

We will be set to task to rebuild our world and our planet from centuries of decimation and destruction brought on by the fallacy, the belief that we once tragically and collectively embraced thousands of years ago – the mistaken notion that we are separate from one another and everything else on the planet and in the universe. We will finally recognize that the truth is just the opposite – we are all one with everything on the planet and in the universe. We are spiritual beings, infinite consciousness simply having a human experience, and as soon we come to fully recognize and understand this, it will then finally be time for us to fly – to shine in all of our infinite, glorious possibility...